On recasting:
I really like the recasting in the Kelvin films and on DISCOVERY. However, the recasting was not just plugging a new actor into the old costume to read the old actor's lines. Chris Pine wasn't asked to play William Shatner's Captain Kirk. He was asked to play Jim, a troubled, lonely, arrogant, showboating wiseass whose inability to resolve conflict peacefully masks a gift for leadership, improvisation and problem solving. Pine played a man who had the potential to become William Shatner's Captain Kirk.
And Zachary Quinto wasn't asked to play Leonard Nimoy's stately, diplomatic, detached scientist. He played an angry youth whose frustrated nature was tempered by the logic instilled in him by his father. He sought to behave and choose logically, but his demeanor indicated a repressed fury that Pine's Jim unleashed with comments about his mother. Quinto wasn't playing THE Spock, he was playing a young man who could become Spock.
Ethan Peck has a superficial similarity to Nimoy's bearing, but Peck played a version of Spock who had come apart at the seams. And even before that, the Spock that Peck played was not the Nimoy-Spock of TOS but the less defined version from "The Cage." This was a Spock before he had selected his persona.
In most of the recastings, we weren't being asked to pretend that these were the old actors playing the old characters. Instead, it was more like when a long running TV show casts a child actor to play a lead character in a flashback, except the Kelvin and DISCOVERY recastings would then have this younger actor transition to playing the fully grown version after they'd won the audience's acceptance.
I'm not sure how to pull this trick off for Data and I suspect it would be futile to try. It might be best to come up with a unique gameplan for Data that is as unique as his character. But the truth is, I'm partial to what Harrison Ford said who he'd want to play Indiana Jones after him: "Nobody. Nobody is going to be Indiana Jones. When I'm gone, he's gone."
The thing that always weirds me about with CG Cushing is that his movements are at a different framerate from the humans in his scenes. His facial movements are that of an animated character, not a living being. I can see the calculated algorithms underneath his skin. It doesn't have the emotive randomness of a person. It's not Peter Cushing. It's an approximation of Peter Cushing. And if Data moved like that, it would make sense to me; Data is an approximation of a person.
